For the Mycophiles

 If you were to take a walk through a west coast wood, at a certain time of year, perusing the forest floor, peaking beneath wide fallen leaves at the base of cedars and around decaying maples and firs, there is an entire world you might be privy to discovering. Coming out of the dead and decomposing, in all shapes and sizes, grouped together in towers and colonies, or on their own, isolated, and standing stoic, are strange and wonderful growths. Mushrooms and toadstools, mycelium, mucilaginous, and mycobiont fungi—those slippery or puffy, spikey, or smooth, red, orange, brown, black, or the purest translucent white you’ve ever seen, spore-bearing growths are everywhere in the early fall, if you know where to look.

I’ve often told those who would listen that if I were to be a scientist, I would study the world of the fungus. Those heterotrophs, gaining their nutrients by feeding on other organisms, naturally composting and recycling, are the epitome of the circle of life. They represent a healthy and well circulating ecosystem and are among the most underrated and beautiful natural growths that I have ever known.

When I venture into the woods, at the autumn hour each year when tree leaves explode into great collections of colours— red, orange, yellow— now here, now there, everywhere one day and gone the next, I am looking not just for that moment of transition in the canopy, I go also to find the most decadently sculpted fungi.

Heel toe, heel toe, through the forest and along the trails I go. My keen eyes search in the afternoon light, for champignons—flourishes of oyster mushrooms, penny buns, azurescens, lactarius, chicken of the woods, and expanding towers of pleurotus and toadstools. This year, Thanksgiving long weekend, the weather is strange. Looking with my eyes, the evidence of cooler days and even cooler evenings is everywhere. With each passing day, this change exists in the scattering of fallen leaves and trees growing more bare. Yet, as I walk, warm winds blow from somewhere beyond the forest, contradicting the predicted frosts and icy breezes that naturally come with autumn. The warmth, at once nice as it dances along my uncovered skin, is unsettling— a queerness and uncertainty floods my mind for I know I should not be feeling comfort like this in these autumn months.

In California, there is strange lore surrounding the warm Santa Ana winds. Occurring September through May, they originate over the dry, desert regions of southwestern United States and flow westward out to the California coast and the ocean. Some say these winds—whipping down mountain passes, dropping humidity, and sucking moisture from the air, cause strange behaviours in those living along the coast. Folk songs and legends come out of the odd influence this change in the air creates.

Known by some as the season of suicide and divorce, there is a sense of apprehensive foreboding, that creeps into people’s minds and hearts, when the season of the winds arrives. The Santa Anas have been known to cause impulsive actions, upended feelings of uncertainty and restlessness. Many residents lean into the devil winds as their bodies become overcharged with electrical energy; their hair stands on ends and their minds grow lightheaded and nauseous and excuses for bad behaviour and poor life choices are often made at the expense of this shift in the air.

Santa Ana winds are a strange but natural phenomenon along the coast of California. However, warmth is not so natural in these woods, at this late hour in the year. So, as I wander, kneeling to talk to the mushrooms, in awe of the burgeoning blooms of white buttons, I can’t help but don a puzzling and disquieted sense of peculiarity in the easy breeze drifting through the trees and along the surface of the ground these fungi are formed from. Is this the dawn of a new world? Will we now have incongruous and curious winds blowing about, changing the seasons, and disturbing the natural state of this place?

The colonies of mushrooms, black and gold, shaped like angel wings and fresh water oysters, as I walk and wonder, help bring peace to my mind. Long determined as a symbol of good luck in the coming year, a representation of strong relationships and resilience, the massive varietal collections of long necked and slightly curved, stiff, and spongy, bulbous, and flat, furry, and smooth, thick, and translucent, mycelium growing from every place imaginable, gives me hope.

I am a mycophile, a fungi enthusiast, a mushroom seeker, an awestruck observer. If these freakish growths, living off the dead and hidden from sunlight, with healthy in-tact caps, strong stems, and complex root systems, can thrive in such zany days, there is hope that the warm winds coming in will not set off any sort of chaos. Instead, they will release carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorous into the soil and into the atmosphere, continuing the great cycle of life with which they, and we, are so acutely and unavoidably connected.

So, I will continue to walk in the woods at the late hours of the year. I will watch for the mushrooms to sprout, then flesh out, wither, and fade. If they are doing this, the cycle of life and death will continue, no matter the strangeness spreading amongst the winds.